All you need to get way out in the sticks is a 4×4 with decent traction. But to get back, you might need more gear than that. There are plenty of places that you can go to figure out what kind of safety and recovery equipment you might want to carry for your backcountry trip, your vehicle, and your needs. For our trip in two Toyota Tacomas from near Seattle to Banff in Alberta, Canada, we assembled a ton of gear to get us out of any situation we thought we might encounter, and a few we didn’t.